Armando Seijo: Our New Window

About

In a twist towards landscape depiction, the author explores the relationship
between art and technology and approaches the current Ukraine war from a
personal perspective, using a computer as a window for exploration in his aim to
comprehend a confict diffcult to accept, that he simultaneously feels close and
far. Seijo emphatizes with people whose lives got unexpectedly altered through a
brutal and sadly ongoing invasion to their homeland, and he is moved by the fact
that things can drastically change from one day to another.

Google Street View, an ambitious tool that recreates through an unprecedented
photo mapping the pedestrian view of urban areas of the world, enables Armando
Seijo to get a glimpse into a happily unupdated reality, that feels somehow familiar
to him as it refects a neighbouring society, fnding evocative and inspiring scenes
in innocent urban landscapes, today scenarios of a war.

Mapping technology is far from perfect. Shape anomalies, technical defects, colour
aberration, distorted perspectives and unidentifed artefacts are inherent to the
landscape, fact that Seijo, fully aware of his own subjectivity towards reality,
incorporates to his artwork with the premise that he is looking through a distorted
lens and a digital window.

In his landscape depictions, he pursues the intangible attribute that makes places
unique, distilling the genuine beauty of every day in an unconstrained way. His
hope for a better future is conveyed by the expressiveness of his brushwork, and
a warm colour palette that carries vital optimism, but also a nostalgia for the
places he has only visited through his computer and will no longer be the same.